Allelujah Haptism
"I haven't heard the world's answer to everything that's happened -- the meaning of our struggle. And until I learn what it is, I won't die!" Allelujah Haptism is one of the Gundam Meisters serving with Celestial Being. He is a professional soldier of considerable skill, with a murky background that has connections to super-soldier projects in Neo China. He does not discuss these details freely. It is known that he has two personalities. One, Allelujah, is a kind and gentle man - not the sort you would expect to be a brutal soldier. The other, Hallelujah, is a stark survivalist. The two somehow make a complete man. Allelujah pilots the Gundam Arios, a variable high-mobility machine. Background Information (There are probably tons of typos in this shit, perhaps I will fix them some day) Allelujah's earliest memories are ones he'd prefer not to remember. Cold, sterile hallways. Men in coats. Countless tests, examinations, operations, some more painful than others. And dozens of other children just like himself, with the same vacant stare in their eyes. Every day was a new lesson in war, a new way to kill a man, a new horizon in pain. He had nothing, no parents, no family...not even a name to call his own, just an identification number. Perhaps the only way he was able to tolerate it at all was because one day, he was not alone. They did something to his head. He wasn't sure what at the time, but he could hear someone...faintly...faintly crying out to him. He wandered hall after hall following that dim echo until it became stronger, until it ceased to be a disembodied voice and become a young girl on a table. A girl who could not see, hear, talk, taste or feel...but nonetheless spoke within his mind. That was how he met Marie. That was how she gave him his name. For that, he would always be thankful. He began to anticipate their conversations dearly every day, never having known before the notion of looking forward to something. As strange as it was, life seemed to become almost tolerable when he was able to sneak away from tests and combat simulations to talk with her. The body thought it might last forever...no, the truth was that he never even thought about how long those days might last. But ended they did. They'd been watching him, of course. Evaluating his interactions with her, monitoring their brainwave activity. They saw the danger withing the boy, the slumbering monster their research had awakened, but he still had value for the sake of chosen child, at least until they'd collected all the data they needed. After that, he was disposable. An unnecessary, broken weapons to be discarded with all the rest like him. But Allelujah would not go quietly into that good night. Meeting Mary had taught him something of the goodness in life, a hitherto unknown continent he desperately wanted to explore. These men in white coats would not take that away from him. His fellow failures, his brothers in obslescence, agreed. Even if they're children, never bet on scientists against soldiers. They'd overwhelmed what meager forces were kept for security with an almost pathetic level of ease, gaining weapons and a shuttle in the process. He wanted to take Marie with them, but his idealism was tempered by the sobering reality that she could not survive the trials that awaited them in her present state. Besides, Marie was the favored child, the prodigy. Whatever awaited her, he was sure she'd not be disposed of like him. He bid her a sad farewell before joining his brethren in escape, promising to come back one day. But the ordeal had only just begin. The act of escape had been the only thing on anyone's mind, the sheer necessity of breaking free to avoid an imminent death. No one had thought about how much fuel they might need to get to Earth, how long it would take, the food they would need or how long the life support capabilities of a mere transport shuttle would last, much less how to navigate in space. Supersoldiers or not, they were still children, children adrift in space before a world they'd scarcely ever seen before. Allelujah had thought there could be no hell worse than the interior of that wretched building, but he'd been wrong. The brutality of space matched pound for pound the horror wrought of man's hands. The dark, empty void beyond the thin aluminum of their whole had no tolerance for life, each and every one of them feeling it's suffocating grasp grow tighter on their throats as water dried, food dwindled, power failed and air thinned. One by one they begain to fall. Some of deprivation, others of despair. The terror of that endless night consumed Allelujah. He would've given anything to run away from it, to reach that distant blue sanctuary, a paradise he'd dreamed of over countless nights. If only there were...less of them, less of his brothers. But he couldn't...wouldn't think of that. But Hallelujah could. And not just, think, but do. Eating /his/ food, breathing /his/ air...the contempt of those little bastards knew no bounds. One by one, he surrended them to the heatless grip of space, some more forcefully than others. He laughed, reveled in it, delight in his own completely unrestrained will to survive. He sang the song of their doom, dance with the devil in the pale moonlight, stuck his hand in the cookie jar and raped the cookie. And he /liked/ it, liked it so much he was saddened when there were none left to kill. Suddenly bore, Hallelujah went back to sleep. And Allelujah lived on. But the deceptively pristine blue world he beheld proved to be no sanctuary. The reason men conspired to create existences like his sprang up before him in a neverending series of bloody conflict and escalations that he seemed unable to escape, no matter where he went. No matter where Allelujah went, the echoes of war seemed not far behind. He wasn't sure just how long he spent like that, how many years he wandered from place to place, getting by as he could. But one day he knew he was through, that he'd had enough. He had not come through hell to die in squalor on a wretched, imperfect world. He had left to seek paradise, Heaven..and if it did not exist here, than he would make it so. A world free of conflict, a planet riven of war...who better to make that a reality than a man fashioned to perpetuate it? He didn't even need to find them; they found him. He wasn't sure how they knew about him, much less how they'd found him. But they appeared suddenly and without warning, messengers come to deliver him to roled he was born to play. They called themselves Celestial Being. They wanted to end war, usher in a world free of conflict. A naive, idealistic outlook...but one Allelujah shared nonetheless. He resolved to himself then to work towards a world where there would never be a need to create things like himself. There was no way he'd be able to face the memories of the comrades he'd left behind in space, much less Marie, otherwise. Personality Traits (Again, typos. Don't care!!!) Allelujah is a naturally kind soul by most people's definition of the word. He fights as member of Celestial Being somewhat reluctantly, preferring to solve problems through dialogue but recognizing that fighting is a brutal necessity of the world he is trying to change. Strangely, the many blood conflicts he's been witness and participant to (along with his less than pleasant past) do not seem to have phased the young meister's tender inclinations. Allelujah is often fond of a nature walks and hiking when he happens to be planetside, finding the pristine beauty and peace of the outdoors to be a better reflection of his true self than the steel corridors and narrow walkways of any building or spaceship, which tend to remind him too much of the super soldier facility. Among the gundam meisters, the so-called super soldier is perhaps the most likely to show empathy in a more direct manner to his fellow man, a trait that has proved both a strength and liability in the past. To whit, Allelujah wants to help people, even go as far as to save them. In a broad sense, his membership in Celestial Being is a form of this desire (What would help people more than the end of war, after all?). He'll even go as far to prioritize the safety of non-combatants over mission directives should they conflict, which has caused friction between him and certain other meisters in the past. Particularly sensitive to the plight and dangers fraught in space travel, Al would never want anyone to experience the kind of drawn-out horror and isolation he experience adrift in the darkness as a child, and does not hesitate to intervene in impromptu rescue operations of such manner. Being of a generally even-handed temperament, Al is not someone who one can very easily get a rise out of. The mental training of a supersoldier still carefully guiding his mind even in the most subdued ways, the Gundam Meister is not one to panic in tense situations, be they in the battleground or social arena. Rather, Allelujah has innately tactical level of thinking that often allows him the luxury of divorcing his situation from his thoughts, a process no doubt made easier by his rather unique mental configuration. It could be said his placid, methodical thinking makes him the most strategy-minded of his fellows and an effect of piloting a machine with a bit less overwhelming offense than the others. This also may be why he seems to have the closest relationship with the tactical commander of the Meisters, Sumeragi Lee Noriega. Socially, Allelujah tends to be something of a wallflower, particularly with people he doesn't know. Perhaps owing to his nature as a military experiment, so the Gundam Meister feels set a bit apart from other people, a gulf of unresolved trauma and mental episodes barring him from truly appreciating any sense of normality required for day to day interactions with 'common' people. As such, he far prefers /watching/ others rather than talking to them, and even in discussions with fellow Meisters has often been content to sit back and let the more talkative ones have the floor, moreoften than not finding himself in agreement with a given course of action in the first place without even having to air his own opinion. Thus, when Al does choose to speak up, or confide in another, the action certainly carries a certain weight that hise closest comrades heave learned to both recognize and respect. Privately, Allelujah is driven by guilt over his past on several levels. First, a sort of survivor's guilt on account of believing himself to be the only super soldier subject who managed to escape and live on freely. Joined to that is an overwhelming sense of culpability in the countless acts of savagery his darker half, Hallelujah, has committed, beginning with the wholesale slaughter of his friends on their drifting space shuttle and furthers acts of unnecessary brutality on the battlefield during those terrible moments where he's managed to lose himself to Hallelujah's sadistic actions. By working with Celestial Being and achieving the goal of a world without war Al hopes to find some measure of atonement or absolution from the crimes he is responsible, but knows somewhere in his soul that it can't be enough. In his darkest, most self-loathing moments, what Allelujah truly wishes for, that he may not even consciously be aware of, is that he is captured or imprisoned, made to pay and face an accounting of all the terrible things he has done. While he may be a super soldier, Al /is/ still human, and even his clear-minded thinking can falter...and tends to do so at the worst possible times. The truth is that Allelujah fears death as much as anyone else and, in fact, may be the most prone of Celestial Being's meisters to this particular human failing. He wants to survive, to keep on living, and will do nearly anything in order to avoid death's chilled grasp. The youth never quite stopped thinking he was meant to die in that drifting ship along with his comrades, believing somewhere in the depths of his mind that one day the void shall return to claim it's due. It is during those moments, when he feels the hand of darkness closing about his throat, when it seems nearly certain that he is about to be killed, that Allelujah loses control. He doesn't know or isn't willing to do what it takes to survive, and that's where 'he' comes in... Hallelujah is the other side of the troubled Gundam Meister, his twisted half. Born of the traumatic experience of quantum brainwave surgery and it's lingering effects, Hal is a separate personality created by Allelujah in order to deal with the realities and horrors he himself could not deal with. The cruelty of the world, the brutal struggle for survival...these have been Hallelujah's only succor, and it's no surprise then that he's...well, quite fucked. To whit, he is everything Allelujah is not: Decisive where he is hesitant, brutal where he is kind, every single unrestrained impulse Allelujah has ever felt wrapped in a single homicidal package. Hallelujah loves nothing more than slow pain and death of his enemies amidst the wholesale, senseless destruction he wreaks upon the battlefield. The world is an utterly pointless mass of bloody chaos, so why not enjoy it? Fortunate for everyone that Hal tends to get bored easily, he's often gone as soon as the fighting is finished, and he /will/ finish it. Talents & Abilities Relationships Allelujah Hallelujah Logs *2010-04-28 - Prison Visit - Soma Peries and Revive Revival go to visit an unexpected prisoner. *2010-05-12- The Man in the Mask - Allelujah receives a new visitor, a man who hides his face behind an ornate mask. What could he possibly want with the Gundam Meister? *2010-05-25 - Reunited - 'Soma Peries' pays another visit to Allelujah upon being rescued from captivity, though she does not know herself by that name... *2010-05-30 - Leo Stenbuck Strikes Back - With Marie unconscious after their regretfully short reunion, two of her squad mates decide to interrogate Allelujah personally. For one of them, it's not his first rodeo. * 2010-06-01 - Welcome Back - Anew greets a recently recovered Allelujah Haptism when he awakens and offers a friendly ear. *2010-06-05 - Bottoms Up - Al singlehandedly destroys Sumeragi's newfound sobriety in typically clueless fashion. Category:Katharon Category:Mobile Suit Gundam 00 Category:Celestial Being Category:Gundam Meisters Category:Super Soldiers Category:Child Murderers